I was just wondering, since the support of GNOME-2 is soon to end and KDE-3.5.x is already "dead" (except for Trinity), how much trouble it would be to "freeze" the current state of such things?

I'm not using either, but my wife is and she can live with the bugs available, but can't do her work with the all new versions. So I thought about finding all needed deps to build ie GNOME 2.32, rewriting/patching it where needed to store it under ie /opt/gnome-2.32.

Since these are full-featured DEs, there's not much - at least for her - she's needing which need to be always up2date and thus relying on newer libs.

I know, this is a very windows-sy/osx-sy approach, but it's still better than being forced to use shitty applications/environments.

So, I'm wondering, has anyone already done such a thing, is there a feature in portage I don't know about and which could help here or are there portage-devs interested in such a thing? To make it clear, I'm not asking for further maintainance, just a proper way to keep the status quo._________________++++++++++[>+++++++>++++++++++>+++>+<<<<-]>++.>+.+++++++..+++.>++.<<+++++++++++++++.>.+++.------.--------.>+.>.

Propably impossible, you can freeze the tree, but it will be hard to just freeze a DM.
Soon or later you'll get a "dbus is blocking udev-x-x" and if dbus is a need by the DM, you're dead. You might then block that newer udev version to keep the one that agree to live with dbus, but you'll just see you're on the way to have a total frozen tree.

KDE 3.5 is still in kde-sunset overlay; I'm sure there will be a gnome-sunset once GNOME2 gets punted._________________“And even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.”– Hillary Clinton, Jan. 21, 2010

About 2.5 years ago I installed kde-3.5.10 on my wife's lappy.
At the time kde4 made it's entrance.
I didn't want her to have all kinds of troubles with it.
From time to time I make complete backups of her system and /home.
It's still running w/o problem and my wife is quite content.
Of course if she ever needs something new I'll be in trouble because I never synced.
Gerard._________________To install Gentoo I use sysrescuecd.Based on Gentoo,has firefox to browse Gentoo docs and mc to browse (and edit) files.
The same disk can be used for 32 and 64 bit installs.
You can follow the Handbook verbatim.
http://www.sysresccd.org/Download

Propably impossible, you can freeze the tree, but it will be hard to just freeze a DM.
Soon or later you'll get a "dbus is blocking udev-x-x" and if dbus is a need by the DM, you're dead. You might then block that newer udev version to keep the one that agree to live with dbus, but you'll just see you're on the way to have a total frozen tree.

Valid point, but what about running - if needed - two instances of udev in parallel, ie udevd and udevd_old and somehow patch the packages to communicate under another namespace this old udev provides?

Is udev even needed that much? The only thing I know it does is taking care of automounting - which she uses - but which could probably be replaced by another method.

Her problem in general is, she's not a techy person and doesn't see the "great thing", ie doesn't know about or doesn't like drag'n'drop for example. For fun, I transfered her desktop to a virtual machine yesterday and updated it to GNOME-3 (Fedora Box) and she acts like a toddler, not finding anything.

I'm a little pissed that devs throw away working code and replacing it without thinking about people used to it. I mean, the intent to make it easier for noobs is good and dandy, but only for new noobs, not for once used to accomplish a given task in a trained way. But then again, that may be one of the problems why Linux isn't desktop-ready for this group of people - might as well just give her my Macbook _________________++++++++++[>+++++++>++++++++++>+++>+<<<<-]>++.>+.+++++++..+++.>++.<<+++++++++++++++.>.+++.------.--------.>+.>.